No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
This issue of Central European History may at first seem some-what unexpected. All the following papers pertain to the early modern period. All of them moreover originated in connection with an exhibition of works of art, “Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680. A Selection from North American Collections,” its published catalogue, and a symposium, “The Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680,” held on the occasion of the exhibition's opening. The papers published in this issue are accordingly essays in art, literary, intellectual, and, more generally, cultural history; some words may be needed to explain how they come to appear here now.
1. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680: A Selection from North American Collections (Princeton, 1982)Google Scholar.
Reference is made to this catalogue in the following papers. Some of the remarks made in the present introduction summarize the arguments of the catalogue introduction.
2. For art at the court of Rudolf II, see now DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas, L'Ecole de Prague: La Peinture à la cour de Rodolphe II (Paris, 1985).Google Scholar
3. These issues are discussed at length in Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 3ff. Nevertheless, one additional quotation may suggest some of the quality of an attitude that has continued to dominate scholarship, even after the Second World War. In the introductory comments to his monumental monograph on the architect von Erlach, Johann Bernhard Fischer (Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, 2 rev. ed., Vienna, 1976, 7)Google Scholar, Hans Sedlmayr speaks in the following way about Andreas Schlüter, who was born in Gdańsk (Danzig), which was at the time under Polish sovereignty, and about von Erlach, who was born in Graz, Styria, then ruled by the House of Austria: “Die ersten grossen Künstler nach dem Ereignis, das Wilhelm Pinder den ‘Untergang der altdeutschen Kunst’ gennant hat—nach dem Tode Dürers, Altdorfers und Holbeins, nach hundertfünfzig Jahren italienischer und niederländischer Vorherrschaft in der deutschen Kunst—, sind Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach und Andreas Schlüter”—and this of artists who were manifest admirers of (and deeply schooled in) Italian art.
4. A somewhat similar approach has been taken by Braunfels, Wolfgang, ed., Die Kunst in Heiligen Römischen Reich (Munich, 1979ff.); Braunfels explains this approach in vol. 1 (Munich, 1979), 12–14Google Scholar.
5. I am referring here of course to work associated first of all with the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, which has established itself as a center for research in various aspects of Central European culture of the Renaissance and “Baroque” eras. The catalogues of the library's own collections of manuscripts and printed books help fill in some of the bibliographic lacunae. Efforts are also now under way to create an even fuller version of the Short Title Catalogue of the British Library, London, for books published in the German-speaking lands in the seventeenth century.
For German literature there is also available Dünnhaupt, Gerhard, Bibliographisches Handbuch der Barockliteratur, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1981).Google Scholar
6. For the question of the history of the reception and valuation of German “Baroque” literature, see Jaumann, Herbert, Die deutsche Barockliteratur: Wertung—Umwertung: Eine wertungsgeschichtliche Studie in systematischer Absicht, Abhandlungen zur Kunst-Musik-und Literarurwissenschaft, 181 (Bonn, 1975)Google Scholar. Jaumann also considers the relationship of the history of the reception of the Baroque in literary history to its treatment by historians, passim.
7. A good recent overview of this problem is provided by Forster, Leonard, “Die Bedeutung des Neulateinischen in der deutschen Barockliteratur,” in Deutsche Barockliteratur und europäische Kultur (Zweites Jahrestreffen des Internationaten Arbeitskreises für deutsche Barockliteratur [Dokumente des Internationalen Arbeitskreises für Deutsche Barockliteratur]) (Hamburg, 1977), 53–71Google Scholar.
8. Besides an introduction by the present author, lectures were delivered at the symposium by Professor Theodore K. Rabb (Princeton University) on “Neglected Issues in the Social History of the Empire 1550–1650: Some Implications of Amman's Ständebuch,” and by Professor Konrad Oberhuber (Fogg Art Museum and Harvard University) on “Central European Drawings of the 16th Century between South and West (or German Drawings of the 16th Century and their Relationship to Italy and the Netherlands).”
9. See Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, e.g., 27.
10. Such are the implications of Erwin Panofsky, “Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit ‘Kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe,’” reprinted in Oberer, Hariolf and Verhayen, Egon, eds., Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1974), 49–76Google Scholar; Panofsky distinguishes between what he defines as Kunsttheorie “rein empirischen Kunstgeschichte,” and “Kunstgeschichte als Interpretationswissenschaft” (p. 68), which builds on both of them. Note also the discussion of two kinds of “Kunstwissenschaft” in Sedlmayr, Hans, “Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft,” reprinted as “Kunstgeschichteals Kunstgeschichte” in Kunst und Wahrheit: Zur Theorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte, rev. ed. (Mittenwald, 1978), 49–80Google Scholar.
An interesting critique of Panofsky and Sedlmayr, and a newer approach to problems of art historical interpretation, is offered by Bätschmann, Oskar, Einführung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik: Die Auslegung von Bildern (Darmstadt, 1984)Google Scholar. König, Eberhard, “Gesellschaft, Material, Kunst: Neue Bücher zur deutschen Skulptur um 1500,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 47, no. 4 (1984): 550–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has also recently pointed to the interconnected nature of approaches to problems of connoisseurship and efforts at social or cultural history of art, in the context of a trenchant review of Baxandall's, MichaelThe Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London, 1980).Google Scholar
11. Allegory on the Battle of White Mountain, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1978.494Google Scholar; discussed in Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, cat. nr. 68, pp. 180–81. See below, p. 86, and illustration.
12. Fučíková, Eliška, “Veduta v rudolfínském Krajinářství,” Umění 31, no. 5, (1983): 397, 399Google Scholar, has attempted to make a more precise attribution of this drawing to Egidius Sadeler and to date it 1621. Her attempt is based on rather unconvincing formal comparisons to details in a print by Sadeler, and can be refuted by using the same method of comparison to better comparanda, namely signed drawings by Sadeler dating from 1618 (e.g., in the Kitto Bible, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; see the “Census” infra) and from following years. This attribution was already considered and rejected by the compiler in writing the catalogue, but the problem of Sadeler's drawings awaits thorough treatment in a forthcoming dissertation by Dorothy Limouze, Princeton University.
13. The investigation of the history of art in Central Europe in relationship to the Thirty Years'War is a subject that merits much further study. Because of assumptions about the widespread destruction and disruption caused by the war, only a few selected aspects of the art of the time have received any attention. Langer, Herbert, The Thirty Years' War (Poole, 1980; 1st ed.Leipzig, 1978), 226–34Google Scholar, can be taken as characteristic of the kind of attention the art of that time receives.